As someone who has lived most of his life in Iran, I ask those who find any alignment with the IRGC to please understand that it is a religiously fanatic military and terrorist group.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
I don't care about Iran's leadership and think this shouldn't be the US's war to fight. And given that it's our war now, we aren't even trying to replace their government, we're just attacking per Israel's wishes. There must be a lot of Americans who agree.
> alternatives
maybe start fixing problems at home before spending tens of billions not fixing things anywhere else? we can't even change ourselves for the better, an adjudicated rapist, alleged pedophile rules us, and we're going to reform other countries? what grounds do we have to be casting stones ? "they're killing protests" - we're jailing them for 30 years and ice is killing people extrajudicially. we have millions without healthcare, above subsistence employment, food security. Why are americans worried about "changing" iran?? Let's look in the mirror, folks.
Either treat it as not our problem, or if we're going to get involved, have a strategy to change the government. Yes it has been done at least once from the outside, maybe twice.
The alternative is what the last five American presidents have done: containment. There's a reason Biden, Obama, Bush, Clinton and Bush didn't start the war that Trump did. This is why.
Ground troops have to invade Iran. Trump can't do that now because of upcoming midterm elections. After the elections, if there is no other way then Trump has to send ground troops in.
I’m sure they’re no angels, but the people on the other side (not the gulf states, that other country) are so nakedly evil that it’s hard not to root for them a little bit
The way I am seeing this situation is that Iran is like Soviet Russia under Stalin, a totalitarian dictatorship.
Israel is like Nazi Germany. When Nazi Germany attacked Russia, the Russians suddenly became the good guys because the Nazis were much worse!
The IDF is the moral equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen and has committed a genocide in Gaza and now expanding to Lebanon (call it mass-murder if you are uncomfortable with the g-word).
Israel is a genocidal state, and if they refuse to stop that behavior and to make reparations to the Palestinians and the other neighbors who they continually attack, then it is for the best if their country is destroyed entirely.
I doubt you'll find many people here who are in alignment with a bigoted and criminal regime such as Iran's and its military.
What may be misinterpreted as sympathy for them is sympathy for the suffering Iranians, and antipathy for the criminal and bigoted US foreign policy especially in the Middle East. This did not start with Trump's recent idiotic game; Iran's only democratically elected president so far was toppled in 1953 by the CIA at the request of Churchill, because they felt Iran's oil does not belong to the Iranian people but to British Petroleum.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
I totally agree with most of what you’ve said. The only part I disagree with is the whitewashing of what the IRGC has done across the region for years. Dismissing or minimizing its actions/impact simply because we also oppose other bad actors is, imo, a critical mistake.
It's interesting that Cuba, Iran, and even Venezuela all took as part of their identity some sort of adversarial position with the United States (although Venezuela was post-Chavez). The US is currently treating them, to some degree at their word at this point.
Whereas you could look at a place like Vietnam that fought its war and moved on, Trump's focus is largely dealing with actors that never did. I suspect the Saudi's won't be the only Nuclear deal signed. So much of this is just the cold war extended, but with North Korea and Iran trying to work their way past non-proliferation. The natural response would also be to arm South Korea and possibly Japan. All of which would have been the West's natural response to non-proliferation being violated.
I get the perception, but much of this is decades in the making and almost everyone involved including the US should have sued for peace years ago. Actual peace. Not, "we're not firing rockets but Israel can't exist."
Trump's domestic policies are an abject, colossal failure (hey remember the 10% credit cards and eliminating the deficit and the debt and fixing the goods trade deficit -- now at historic highs, btw -- and all those big DOGE and tariff rebates, and...), and just invading random nations has always been a go to when that happens. Traditionally it was easy public support, and after a whole campaign about being insular and not being the world's cop, suddenly it's guns blazing and let's boost military spending to $1.5T (while simultaneously stepping back from NATO). So Trump picked some targets that would minimize kickback. And are you saying that not being friends with the US is a green light to invade? I mean, you understand that by every principal of international law, the US is a criminal pirate empire, terroristically murdering in large numbers at will.
I guarantee that Trump has asked the US military for concrete plans on invading Canada, Greenland, and beyond. There is zero question about it, and it will all come out in the ashes that remain after this disastrous administration.
And sure, proliferation is going to go wild, not because the US bequeathed them (I mean...do people think the US holds the key to nuclear weapons? That it gives the green light?). The US has taught a lesson that everyone needs to get nukes, and most of them should be pointed at the US.
We are headed to an incredibly dangerous timeline. And eventually it is going to end up with some glassed American cities. But hey, at least the Trump crime syndicate got rich in the process!
Sounds like exactly what a covert Zionist would say.
Trying to blame the genocide in Gaza on Iran is particularly insulting, after we've seen Israel slaughter 20,000+ kids and 75,000+ civilians in 4k [1], who continue killing Palestinians every day with 60 Palestinians killed in the past week, burning families in their home whilst they sleep [2] despite the "ceasefire", and who've killed more journalists than anyone else trying to prevent people reporting on their atrocities [3].
Radars and bases along the path of travel from Iran to Israel have been progressively degraded. Various interceptor types also have low stockpiles at present. I'm absolutely not an expert keeping well-informed, but my understanding is that Jordan's recent losses mean much of the path is now relatively clear of air defenses, and Israel would have to mount most/all defenses from their own territory for the first time. But Israel is at-present not engaging in the war, preferring to let US do the work, as a minister recently stated. Regardless, it may be attacked, depending on IDF actions in Lebanon.
Iran also isn't hitting Israel because they know Israel will go after Tehran and the regime more directly. They were the ones to target the Basij police, industrial and steel plants, government buildings etc. America is mostly constraining itself to bombing the coast and military assets, with a focus on the strait.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
The north of israel also wasn't evacuated for the recent Iran campaign. That was in 2024 and they didn't evacuate for the recent ground invasion they did in Southern Lebanon.
You seem to be woefully uninformed on this subject. Far northern Israel was evacuated in 2023 and has long since moved on to reconstruction. No significant damage in the area was directly from Iran, it was all from Hezbollah (their proxy militia in Lebanon).
Iran has recently demonstrated the ability to execute accurate strikes in Jordan. If it can do so in Jordan, it can do so in Israel once Israeli air defences are similarly degraded. Doubly so because many missiles meant for Israel were intercepted by Jordan.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
The Israelis are the only ones that can, and want, to strike back. Besides no one weeps for missiles falling on Israeli cities, so that doesn’t serve the Iranians at all. Lots of much softer targets for Iranian missiles which can’t do anything to Iran.
Forgive the uninformed question, but doesn't Saudi Arabia also have significant armed forces? Given that Iran has closed the Straights of Hormuz and attacked several other Arab states, and has conducted strikes in Saudia Arabia itself, wouldn't that give Saudia Arabia a solid reason to strike back?
From what I have read, their armed forces aren’t very motivated. There are stories about pilot trainings where the pilots were a bunch of rich guys that got into their jet, took off with full afterburner, did some fun loops and landed after using up their fuel.
Saudi has the advantage that they have the US doing the dirty work for them. No need to do much themselves.
Between this and the Wildberries depot strikes in Ukraine, I think it really highlights how much peace was required to make the centralisation we've experienced work.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who thought naively he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
As an aside: I lack the vocabulary, but man those interactive "stats" cards scream LLM-written to me. No problem with it, necessarily, just something about that style seems to raise a flag in my mind.
They are certainly LLM-generated. I'm sure it's been done, but I would love to see a comprehensive look into what it is exactly that makes a UI seem LLM-generated.
From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.
I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Lack of visual hierarchy. Lots of use of bold text to make numbers stand out, without bolding the corresponding labels. Reliance on heavily-saturated primary colors. Limited attention paid to alignment.
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
I'm not sure I would consider it too dense. If anything I think they tend to be too sparse, although this could just be that they're often used for marketing type sites, which seem to want to make you scroll and click a lot for anything anyway, even if you have the screen space.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
> I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
Probably something to do with the training data and how it’s weighted. It’s the same how the writing is essentially full of overused phrases, the AI slop feel.
They're definitely Claude generated. People at my last company loved to generate pages & stat cards with Claude and they all had this exact same style.
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
An adjoining substation to BAH53 had one of it's two main buildings damaged/destroyed about 2026-07-16 per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-data-center-power-substation-bahrain-jul-16th-2026-142024
Then about 2026-07-22 BAH53 itself was damaged/destroyed per https://soaratlas.com/maps/asia-damage-to-amazon-web-services-bahrain-jul-22nd-2026-142112
Possibly the least defended of the three sites as there is no air/missile defence battery in between this site and Iran.
No media reports about this data centre being attacked previously. Possibly the safest of the three as there are at least two (probably three) air/missile defence batteries in between this site and Iran.
Apparently the Batelco DC.1 data centre adjoining (and apparently critical to) BAH55 was damaged/destroyed about 2026-04-01 per https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk28nj0lrjo _or_ the adjoining substation to these two facilities was damaged/destroyed -- news articles are hard to follow as to what exactly might have been damaged and the extent of damage caused.
Middle ground for defence with one or two (maybe three) air/missile defence batteries between this site and Iran, depending on where drones/missiles are launched from.
If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.
> If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain
I've seen data centers that were built to withstand an aircraft impact (they were located on a major airport flight path). I wonder if they'd rebuild these to that standard or something even stronger, given these attacks. It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
Here's a Google Maps link to BAH53 (Manama), it doesn't look like the hardened data centers I seen (e.g. sloped walls like a bunker): https://maps.app.goo.gl/6DjhQs753p6EHQUu6
Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587
There were almost daily posts in HNs front page about it 4 months ago when it first happened, as well as front page headlines on CNN and WSJ and other news outlets, though they quickly got drowned out by all of the other Iran war stories when the war first broke out.
The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.
Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.
> Why is it pointless to inform and remind others about what Israel did in the region?
It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.
There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.
It's been extensively reported on, and any AWS user that clicks on the health dashboard would also have seen it, even if they don't consume from news outlets.
As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.
> Makes me wonder how much use it actually gets if this is the first we’re hearing about it.
Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.
Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".
There was a building hit near the data center on the first day of the war and that took down one AZ (unfortunately, two of my three EC2 instances were in that AZ). The hit on April 1 pretty much took it all down. Fortunately I had relatively up-to-date backups (both within 24 hours before each outage) so all I lost was a little email (spam) and some libera chat logs. I've moved to ap-southeast-1, which means trading a ~ 60ms ping to ~ 110ms.
I'm kinda surprised Amazon didn't send a team to collect all storage devices from the wreckage and ship them elsewhere to be connected to the network for recovery.
It's not like Amazon doesn't have tactical teams on call - if that was a priority, I'm sure it would have been done. But like any good datacenter provider, they have offsite backups, and I'd expect the damaged hardware will just be written off.
I feel for both, people who where hosting there not expecting this war and this attack and the attackers, because they didn't attack just because they wanted but attacked as a response as stated earlier.
> How long will it take to rebuild those datacenters given the supply shortage?
Amazon will already have quite a lot of hardware queued up for new datacenter builds and expansions, some of that will presumably be redirected to this project once folks stop chucking missiles around. They also pride themselves on the speed of new datacenter rollout - even if they have to bulldoze the site and start from scratch, I doubt it takes as long as a year.
Play with fire... if you sell services to store intelligence on occupied population to the occupant, and have no qualms about it, should anyone care you get your shit bombed from time to time? Just comes with the territory. Aside from hating how much real resources are wasted on pointless wars and assholery between people, at least this is fair.
> The AWS strikes did not emerge from an improvised targeting decision. On March 31, 2026, the IRGC formally declared eighteen US technology companies “legitimate military targets” — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Intel, HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, Nvidia, Palantir, Tesla, Boeing, General Electric, JPMorgan Chase, and G42, the Abu Dhabi-based AI firm.
Given these companies are selling the AI and cloud tech that's used by US and Israel in their invasions, wars, genocides, etc, it's no surprised that they would be deemed dual use.
Fwiw, there is tons of evidence of these company's complicity with Israel's occupation (it's probably a much longer list if we want to look at those that enable the US' wars).
Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to
their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]
It's amazing how these people don't seem to get that the very fact it's an occupation makes basically everything Israel does there illegitimate.
If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Also, Israel designates tents dual use.
Designating an AWS location very likely used for targeting assistance during this war on Iran is a very different thing.
>If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Honestly, great point. You make a compelling argument that ICE's treatment of illegal immigrants is completely justified. As you correctly point out, no one should care what they say as their presence is illegal. Any action against them is therefore legitimate.
>If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Unless they're illegal immigrants flooding the West. Then it's acceptable to leftists.
You mean that massive "Hamas headquarters" that the IDF promised us was under Al Shifa hospital? The one they made renders of with dozens of rooms, but after attacking the hospital all we got was footage of single small hospital-tiled room, that Israelis themselves admitted they built?
It seems only fair that Iran's frozen funds be permanently seized and used to pay for damages caused to Amazon, ships, and other facilities it targeted during the war.
> Who, if anyone, is Iran allowed to retaliate against?
The answer here is surrender and disarmament. It's the only outcome that seems compatible with the reintegration of Iran into the world economy, normalization of diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, and path to development/prosperity for its people.
And what does Iran get in return for America butchering 160 innocent kids, or assassinating their leader? Or does "fairness" only flow in one direction?
installing a brutal puppet dictator to torture and murder civilians counts as what exactly?
and protecting them from being tried criminally after theyve been deposed?
the US continues to blow up civilian infrastructure, and those WMDs that sadam was supposed to have were american made, for the purposes of using on iranian civilians.
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
At some point, as an American, we must accept the consequences for being warmongers. If we want less harm, we should stop causing it all around the world for no objective gain (prove me wrong, I see no gains, only trillions of dollars incinerated and countless lives lost). But the US keeps lobbing stones expecting no consequences for doing so. Something about insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
You can say the same, neither Iran nor the US is the good guy. It’s about as sane as the Star Trek episode where deaths are mandated by simulation outcome. It is what it is until political turnover provides an opportunity, but not a guarantee, of change.
My children will avoid any form of participation in US military operations, and I legally avoid paying as much US federal tax as possible, so I don’t have a strong opinion on the topic. Old men sending young innocent people to die is a tale as old as time, and I expect it to continue long after I’m gone, so the best one can do is manage your personal risk accordingly. If tail risk catches you (“wrong place at the wrong time”), it happens.
> They can mind their own business, but they chose not to.
Neither the US nor Iran can do that. Iran and the US are in very different positions:
The US is the status quo power; they and their allies dominate the Mideast and Persian Gulf, and are hostile to Iran for geopolitical (control of region), economic (oil), and religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons. There is a long history demonstrating that - Iran would be crazy to trust otherwise. If Iran does nothing, US and allies would control all of the Mideast (including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) and Iran would be helpless to protect itself or exercise its own will on any matter, legitimate or not, and risk getting overthrown and replaced with a US/allied proxy. That happened in the 1950s, and the proxy, the Shah and their heir, brutally ruled Iran until 1979 when the current were part of the Shah's overthrow and took power. Part of their raison d'être is to make sure US and allies never control Iran again. Iran cannot survive by 'minding their own business'.
Iran is the revisionist power; they would like to change the power structure so they are the dominant power, or at least they need to establish independence from the status quo power. They are a much lesser threat to the US than the US is to them, for obvious reasons: Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers and bases off the US coast, complete air superiority in US skies, isn't bombing the US, didn't kill the president, and lacks the power to impose crippling economic sanctions. But they are still a threat with ambitions that the US can't ignore.
The status quo power sets the rules and wants peace on their terms - with them still in power - so of course any challenger is violating the rules and appears to be an enemy of peace without being aware of the dynamic.
> Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe
The US also carries out ops, including those that kill civilians, all over the globe (e.g., bombing speedboats in international waters), as do others. Some US ops are covert but with leadership of the international power structure and the power to act sometimes with impunity (e.g., removing Venezuala's government), they don't have always do it covertly. Iran can't fly bombers everywhere on Earth; they only have covert or insurgent operators for many purposes.
Iran gets to learn "you break it, you buy it," with their own money. The remaining government officials still running their mouths on X and elsewhere should also be grateful they are still alive.
They are behind many atrocities in Iran and in the region including the situation in Gaza (partially). They also provided weaponry and support to Russia against Ukraine.
-Thucydides' Melian Dialogue
Given how clownish the US is handling this war, I'm afraid you just have to get used to it.
Israel is like Nazi Germany. When Nazi Germany attacked Russia, the Russians suddenly became the good guys because the Nazis were much worse!
The IDF is the moral equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen and has committed a genocide in Gaza and now expanding to Lebanon (call it mass-murder if you are uncomfortable with the g-word).
Israel is a genocidal state, and if they refuse to stop that behavior and to make reparations to the Palestinians and the other neighbors who they continually attack, then it is for the best if their country is destroyed entirely.
This is an extremely unpopular war which is being fought for Israel.
Edit: you have used word combinations of almost every Israeli bot accounts I have seen on Reddit.
What may be misinterpreted as sympathy for them is sympathy for the suffering Iranians, and antipathy for the criminal and bigoted US foreign policy especially in the Middle East. This did not start with Trump's recent idiotic game; Iran's only democratically elected president so far was toppled in 1953 by the CIA at the request of Churchill, because they felt Iran's oil does not belong to the Iranian people but to British Petroleum.
Instead this is a conflict where all sides are garbage. It's a conflict where we hope that everyone loses.
On the one side you have a terrorism-sponsoring theocracy that wants to force stone-age beliefs on its people, while exporting mayhem elsewhere. On the other you have Iran. (ba-dum-tss!)
Seriously, though, everyone involved with this conflict are bad actors. The US has bombed some 8 countries so far this year, threatened literal allies such that they got blood supplies ready for an invasion, is busy looting Venezuela like a busted pirate shithole -- basically Somalia -- is starving Cuba, is terroristically blowing up random boats by titling them "narco-terrorists", and is headed by a criminal rapist PoS that is rapidly turning the country into an idiocracy while their military is headed by a ChatGPT spouting imbecile. Israel is a war-criming pariah that pushed their luck a little too far and it turns out you can only bank on "but the holocaust" for so long while you're a rogue hermit nation that has vile behaviours and habits.
It's only in context that Iran, far down in the depths of garbage nations, somehow comes out looking like the better party in the conflict.
Iran's leadership is garbage. They are a bad actor and a long-time destabilizer, precisely like their regional neighbour Israel.
But in the grand scheme of things the US is many magnitudes worse (literally the world's most dangerous nation, without an iota of question or doubt).
All three governments are shit. They are all planetary risks, though the US is undeniably, unquestionably the world's biggest threat.
Whereas you could look at a place like Vietnam that fought its war and moved on, Trump's focus is largely dealing with actors that never did. I suspect the Saudi's won't be the only Nuclear deal signed. So much of this is just the cold war extended, but with North Korea and Iran trying to work their way past non-proliferation. The natural response would also be to arm South Korea and possibly Japan. All of which would have been the West's natural response to non-proliferation being violated.
I get the perception, but much of this is decades in the making and almost everyone involved including the US should have sued for peace years ago. Actual peace. Not, "we're not firing rockets but Israel can't exist."
Trump's domestic policies are an abject, colossal failure (hey remember the 10% credit cards and eliminating the deficit and the debt and fixing the goods trade deficit -- now at historic highs, btw -- and all those big DOGE and tariff rebates, and...), and just invading random nations has always been a go to when that happens. Traditionally it was easy public support, and after a whole campaign about being insular and not being the world's cop, suddenly it's guns blazing and let's boost military spending to $1.5T (while simultaneously stepping back from NATO). So Trump picked some targets that would minimize kickback. And are you saying that not being friends with the US is a green light to invade? I mean, you understand that by every principal of international law, the US is a criminal pirate empire, terroristically murdering in large numbers at will.
I guarantee that Trump has asked the US military for concrete plans on invading Canada, Greenland, and beyond. There is zero question about it, and it will all come out in the ashes that remain after this disastrous administration.
And sure, proliferation is going to go wild, not because the US bequeathed them (I mean...do people think the US holds the key to nuclear weapons? That it gives the green light?). The US has taught a lesson that everyone needs to get nukes, and most of them should be pointed at the US.
We are headed to an incredibly dangerous timeline. And eventually it is going to end up with some glassed American cities. But hey, at least the Trump crime syndicate got rich in the process!
You sure your not talking about Israel? lol
Hard to like anyone in this situation.
Trying to blame the genocide in Gaza on Iran is particularly insulting, after we've seen Israel slaughter 20,000+ kids and 75,000+ civilians in 4k [1], who continue killing Palestinians every day with 60 Palestinians killed in the past week, burning families in their home whilst they sleep [2] despite the "ceasefire", and who've killed more journalists than anyone else trying to prevent people reporting on their atrocities [3].
[1] https://archivegenocide.com
[2] https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/gaza-israel-escalated-attacks...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_journalists_in_the_...
I would say not very covert!
"By way of deception thou shalt do war"
UAE has been down for months, Bahrain is now offline, Saudi Arabia is still under construction.
The whole affair has been so bizarre.
That plus most of Iran's attacks on Israel didn't do anything and likely still won't. Which is why Iran focused on the weaker gulf states even when Israel was involved.
I suspect that Iran knows that going after Dubai would upset a lot of American (and Sunni) billionaires.
...which I now return to...
You may be confused with southern Lebanon, which is.
Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.
Saudi has the advantage that they have the US doing the dirty work for them. No need to do much themselves.
In Wildberries case (and Ozon's shortly), that centralization didn't require much peace at all - just a government that wasn't run by a fascist nutter who thought naively he could invade a neighbor without consequences.
From what I can tell, the issues are: Fonts are too small, secondary fonts have terrible contrast with their backgrounds, information is too dense/not enough white space, overuse of blinking/glowing status dots, overuse of bordered elements, and overuse of accented elements. I am surely forgetting some other issues.
I'm not sure why there seems to be a consistent set of design mistakes that LLMs tend toward.
LLMs in general are pretty terrible at spatial arrangement. You should see some of the architects' critiques of AI-generated floorplans that are on YouTube; the LLM generates a layout that is just nuts. I've found them largely useless at putting together UI mocks; Figma or Photoshop is still way easier to work with if you just want to cut up UI elements and rearrange them.
The status dots are a part of animations in general, which they overuse, especially things like transform/scale on hover and hover effects on many many elements.
I think it's not simply borders but contrasting-color borders often with box shadows.
Probably something to do with the training data and how it’s weighted. It’s the same how the writing is essentially full of overused phrases, the AI slop feel.
2. It’s expected and war, and while war is not good, I wonder about data backups and succession planning for this.
3. It makes sense they would’ve had a fire drill and reviewed since it’s a capital investment, 6 months of war, at the same time Bahrain is considered stable, so I really wonder about the conversation around this and if there was any disaster planning with this scenario in mind.
4. If there wasn’t, I’m sure there is now across all regions of AWS.
This month has been for me, a uptick in unique headlines that I wouldn’t have thought would happen.
BAH53 (Manama): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492345589
BAH54 (Zallaq): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1359931661 BAH55 (Hamala): https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/956069872 If these data centres are rebuilt, you'd maybe expect them to be rebuilt in new locations behind existing _permanent_ (and seemingly quite expensive) air/missile defence batteries in Bahrain (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492281507 and https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1492953902). Based on the permanency of those air/missile defence batteries it doesn't look like the government of Bahrain are expecting things to get safer for data centre hosting in Bahrain any time soon.I've seen data centers that were built to withstand an aircraft impact (they were located on a major airport flight path). I wonder if they'd rebuild these to that standard or something even stronger, given these attacks. It probably wouldn't help much against ballistic missiles, but it might make it more resilient against drone attacks.
Here's a Google Maps link to BAH53 (Manama), it doesn't look like the hardened data centers I seen (e.g. sloped walls like a bunker): https://maps.app.goo.gl/6DjhQs753p6EHQUu6
Edit: Incidentally news of the original strike was posted on HN 5 months ago and flagged, for whatever reason. Why would it be flagged? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317587
This is just one of the popular ones, but there were also tens of posts about it with only 1-10 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47641788
Here’s another popular one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47632503
The reason it’s not really news this week is because both the Bahrain and the Dubai regions have been effectively non-operational for the last 4 months, so the IRGC saying they destroyed an already-destroyed region is less newsworthy.
Because individual HN users do the flagging and many are tired of the inevitable and pointless Israel v Palestine proxy comment war that predictably erupts on any topic related to the Middle East.
It’s the act of comment warring that is pointless. [X/Y] partisans are not intellectually curious about statements coming from a [Y/X] partisan. Nobody’s minds are going to change either way.
There presumably some third parties who could hypothetically be swayed, but from what I’ve seen they’re few and far between.
As for use it gets: plenty of use, mostly when someone needs to have their worlds close to that area (usually latency or legal reasons). There are a lot of smaller businesses that lost a lot (or maybe even everything) because their never thought they would need to create backups in a different region. Most of that wasn't really reported on but instead gets shared on various platforms like Reddit.
Or how good their HA/failover strategy must be.
Although losing one data centre from an availability zone seems like exactly the kind of issue AWS plan for and handle well, and does not take down the whole AZ. By contrast with "our BGP config got messed up".
Winner: US military industrial complex + Israel
Losers: Everyone else
Amazon will already have quite a lot of hardware queued up for new datacenter builds and expansions, some of that will presumably be redirected to this project once folks stop chucking missiles around. They also pride themselves on the speed of new datacenter rollout - even if they have to bulldoze the site and start from scratch, I doubt it takes as long as a year.
The most unpopular war the US has ever known which has made every person in the world worse off financially, all for Israel's demands.
I really don't hate to say it but maybe that ethno state should be left to deal with their matters themselves.
Given these companies are selling the AI and cloud tech that's used by US and Israel in their invasions, wars, genocides, etc, it's no surprised that they would be deemed dual use.
Most recently the UN report: https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ahrc5923-...
Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision making and surveillance and analysis capacities. [99] In October 2023, when the Israeli internal military cloud overloaded, [100] Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. [101] Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, [102] under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. [103] In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word, citing these companies. [104]
If someone enters my house uninvited, I don't care what they have to say to justify themselves because they don't have a right to be there in the first place.
Also, Israel designates tents dual use.
Designating an AWS location very likely used for targeting assistance during this war on Iran is a very different thing.
Honestly, great point. You make a compelling argument that ICE's treatment of illegal immigrants is completely justified. As you correctly point out, no one should care what they say as their presence is illegal. Any action against them is therefore legitimate.
Unless they're illegal immigrants flooding the West. Then it's acceptable to leftists.
What do you think the end result of making regions unstable such as by unprovoked attacks on Iran is?
> you think
Well, maybe I am presuming too much there.
The US started this. Amazon is an American company with many governmental and military contracts. Why would it not be a valid target?
How many Iranian hospitals, schools, bridges, data centers, etc have been destroyed?
The answer here is surrender and disarmament. It's the only outcome that seems compatible with the reintegration of Iran into the world economy, normalization of diplomatic relationships with neighboring countries, and path to development/prosperity for its people.
and protecting them from being tried criminally after theyve been deposed?
the US continues to blow up civilian infrastructure, and those WMDs that sadam was supposed to have were american made, for the purposes of using on iranian civilians.
Like 100s (?) of Americans killed by Iran ever.
Compare to Iranians: Affected by the aftermath of the American coup of Mosaddegh (ultimately leading to IRGC's existence), providing weapons to Iraq for the Iran-Iraq War (200K deaths), etc. + decades of stupid policy trying to take their oil in the name of "regional security" (for "our" oil).
How would it work? Do you expect a 1:1 casualty list? 1:1 list of events? Should the US citizens allow for a coup on US soil carried out by the IRGC?
“Just one more conflict bro” as the kids would say.
Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe, so what’s happening now is expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon
https://www.npr.org/2026/07/18/g-s1-134037/why-is-it-so-hard... (“… the U.S. has been acting like an empire without wanting to be an empire.”)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30908249
Neither the US nor Iran can do that. Iran and the US are in very different positions:
The US is the status quo power; they and their allies dominate the Mideast and Persian Gulf, and are hostile to Iran for geopolitical (control of region), economic (oil), and religious (Shiite-Sunni) reasons. There is a long history demonstrating that - Iran would be crazy to trust otherwise. If Iran does nothing, US and allies would control all of the Mideast (including Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq) and Iran would be helpless to protect itself or exercise its own will on any matter, legitimate or not, and risk getting overthrown and replaced with a US/allied proxy. That happened in the 1950s, and the proxy, the Shah and their heir, brutally ruled Iran until 1979 when the current were part of the Shah's overthrow and took power. Part of their raison d'être is to make sure US and allies never control Iran again. Iran cannot survive by 'minding their own business'.
Iran is the revisionist power; they would like to change the power structure so they are the dominant power, or at least they need to establish independence from the status quo power. They are a much lesser threat to the US than the US is to them, for obvious reasons: Iran doesn't have aircraft carriers and bases off the US coast, complete air superiority in US skies, isn't bombing the US, didn't kill the president, and lacks the power to impose crippling economic sanctions. But they are still a threat with ambitions that the US can't ignore.
The status quo power sets the rules and wants peace on their terms - with them still in power - so of course any challenger is violating the rules and appears to be an enemy of peace without being aware of the dynamic.
> Islamic regime carried out a lot of covert ops against civilian targets all around the globe
The US also carries out ops, including those that kill civilians, all over the globe (e.g., bombing speedboats in international waters), as do others. Some US ops are covert but with leadership of the international power structure and the power to act sometimes with impunity (e.g., removing Venezuala's government), they don't have always do it covertly. Iran can't fly bombers everywhere on Earth; they only have covert or insurgent operators for many purposes.